Save Me
by wehtinykittenprincess
Summary: Nora is a mess. Elijah Dance is here for her but he has competition.
1. Drugs

Chapter 1

Drugs

'Nathan...'

She wakes up cold from a dream, no not a dream. Her harsh reality closes in and she reaches for the wine bottle. It's 200 years old and tastes like sour vinegar but its alcohol content is through the roof and with just a swig she's warm and fuzzy again. Nora was trying to get to the old apartment she had before she met Nate. It was only a few blocks away from the Cambridge Police Station, which back then was a blessing. Having the police so close meant less danger. If only that was the case now. Her Pip-Boy beeped quietly and she looked down at it. The green glow making her skin look sickly. She looks at it, 2:36 am. she needed to get a move on if she wanted to find that apartment. If it was even still there. This world was so diferent from what she remembered so spaced and lonely. Nora hoped beyond hope that it was. She stumbled down the rubble of the building she was sleeping in and tried to make her way to the cracked and mangled asphalt of the street below.

"God I miss him." she said to herself wishing she had died that day. Selfish. She was acting very selfish here lately. Stealing, injuring others, even killing them if she needed to. She remembered the first one she had to kill. A raider. He was just a kid honestly, he couldn't have been more than 17, 18 at the most. He had a note in his pants from who Nora assumed was his mother.

"Johnathan, please come home. We need you Cassy needs you. Your father has been hurt. Please come home."

No signature. Just a note begging a young man to come home. Was Cassy his little sister? Maybe a now fatherless child. Nora didn't have time to dwell on this she had other things on her mind. Her next fix for one. Her lost son far in the back of her mind sitting there nagging at her like a migraine.

Nora strides down the crumbling road as quietly as she can, her Pip-Boys light off and herself barely visible in the dark streets. She knows this place. She stops and looks as she realizes she can hear gunfire in the distance.

'Shit.'

She notices that she can hear the unmistakable sound of power armor and laser pistols. Without thinking she draws her gun. A small 10mm and readies to fire.

'Thank God Nate taught me how to fire one of these.'

Nora cocks it and takes aim at a ghoul. Feral from the radiation all around it. Was that one of her neighbors? Maybe even a friend? She couldn't tell now the skin was leathery and burned. It was easier not to picture them as they once where.

Suddenly a man runs out and slams into a group of them. She shoots. He turns to her and yells something

"Help!" his voice is rough and gravely like a man fighting for his life. She runs over without thinking. Firing in to the crowd of ghouls taking them down efficiently with shots to the head. When they are all dead she goes closer. These are the first people since that Preston fellow and those settlers that she has really seen. Slowly approaching the man in power armor she puts her gun away to show she means no harm.

"State your business civilian." He says calmly. Then looks embarrassed."I-I mean thank you. For stepping in like that. I thought I was done for for a moment" He says shyly.

Nora looks up at him feeling the alcohol wearing off and reaching for the hip flask full of vodka and taking a generous pull.

"No problem. I wouldn't just let someone be overwhelmed like that."

"Well thank you. I am Paladin Danse of the Brotherhood Of Steel. It seems I am in debt to your sharp shooting skills and your kindness. Allow me to repay you, we have supplies and a medic in the buil-" He cut himself off seeing Nora sway and collapse. Her shirt falling open revealing her blue and yellow Vault suit.

'What on earth is a vault dweller doing all the way out here?He looks at her small frame and sees the number '111' on her right side. "111..." He then picks her up and carries her in to the old rotting police station. "Scribe Haylen! We have a woman in need of medical attention!"

He walks carrying the unconscious woman. feeling her weightlessness even after getting out of his Power Armor, she seems to weigh nothing. He can feel her hip bones dig in to his stomach even through all of the clothes.

'How is this woman alive?'

He looks at her, noticing her vault suit is undone at the neck showing her very prominent collar bones and just how slim she is. He lays her down on a mattress on a counter and motions for Scribe Haylen to come take a look. She looks over the skeleton of a woman and begins to undress her trying to see if she is bleeding somewhere or find a reason she had lost consciousness in the middle of speaking with her superior.

"Paladin you may want to leave the room. I need to undress her to check her for wounds."

"OH, UM, right..yes. I will go find something to drape over her..." Paladin Danse was suddenly very embarrassed not thinking she may need to be undressed.

Covering his eyes some and walking quickly from the room as he began to search for some kind of cloth to drape over her.

'You'd think he had never seen a woman nude before...' Scribe Haylen thought as she pulled the pack and clothes offoff of the woman who had effectively saved all of their asses. A mysterious stranger indeed. She pulled the shirt covering the odd blue jumpsuit off of her and laid it neatly on a table. She didn't appear to be bleeding but this jumpsuit was far too big on her. She unzips the front and gasps.

'Oh my... this woman is nearly a skeleton.' she soon realized that at one point this vault suit may have actually fit her properly. From her breast pocket slid a pristine card. An ID card. From before the war. Nora Wallace, birthdate 2-1-2040. The photo... was of the woman laying before her. Albeit with a fuller face and less skeletal but unmistakeably her. Who was this? And how had she survived all these years? Once she got all of the clothes including the vault suit off she breathed a sigh of almost relief. Immediately knowing why the woman was out cold suddenly. She was probably starving. At least she hadn't been shot or mauled by a ghoul. Starvation she could fix easily, a gunshot wound though, not so much. She decided to put the ID card back in Noras pocket, Haylen couldnt make heads or tails of how she was still here, she decided to keep it to her self for now.

'Nathan... honey? Are you there?'

'I'm in here! With Shaun!'

'Home...? I'm back home? The bombs? Did they drop? Am I dead?' Nora walks through her pristine living room and down the hallway. Her gut screaming that something is wrong but what? She opens the door and cold washes over her. Her baby's room is in ruins and her husband lays dead in the cryopod that is somehow in her house. Nora begins to scream.

"Hey! Oww! Stop thrashing! Urghhh..."

Nora feels her foot connect to something soft and fleshy ... and warm? She looks down and realizes she is nearly naked but for her bra and panties. Then she sees a man doubled over and realizes what happened.

"Oh! I am so sorry!" she says panicking, hoping the man doesn't hurt her. She feels dizzy and nearly falls from the bed she's on.

"No, please miss don't get up! I'm fine I promise!" She sees a blurry man and looks around for her glasses. His hand reaches out with them and she puts them on, wishing she had something to clean them with.

That voice... the one calling for help... and then blackness...

Nora sat up slowly and saw the man she had breifly seen before she had passed out. She saw him now though without the haze of booze and drugs. And once she saw him clearly, she was shocked. He looked so familliar. Almost like her Nathan.


	2. Brotherhood

Chapter 2

Brotherhood

A few days pass as she recovers from her injuries and both detoxes and refeeds herself back to where she isn't on the brink of death. She also began to get to know the people around her, Elijah Danse mostly but Nora feels safe when Danse is near her. Safer than she has in a very long time. But the man is an unknown. Nora knows almost nothing of him. The few things she does know are things she could see without asking. His name for one Paladin Danse, "Paladin" wasn't actually his first name, It was a title. He was a high ranking officer in the Brotherhood of Steel. Not super high up, but enough to where he was the commander of a squadron of people. He was also very innocent. He blushed when his squad brought up things like sex and intimacy and almost never had anything to say about the matter.

"Miss Nora? Are you decent?" Called Danse through the door of an old office that he had made in to a makeshift room for her. A bed made from a desk with a mattress on top and a small table with a drawer he salvaged from one of the surrounding apartment buildings.

'I hope shes okay in there...' He thought as he knocked again. She had just gotten sober and relatively clean. All of the jet was out of her system anyway. He had sat and talked to her for hours last night. It was a grey dawn when he had left her room. A storm rolled in yesterday evening and Nora began getting frightened, nervously pacing around the small room and it was driving him mad. So he began to try to talk to her in his most calm voice.

"Nora, would you mind coming here please." he said looking up at her from the spot he was sitting on the floor. Why was she always moving around. It was like she couldnt sit still.

"Huh? Oh... yeah I'll be right there."

"You're a Vault Dweller right? Where you born in your vault? What was it like?" He tried to say smoothly but it came out slightly shaky. "I-If you don't mind me asking."

"My Vault... No I wasn't born there. I was born in a hospital in 2040. I grew up in Boston and attended good schools who taught us that drinking and drug use would ruin our lives. I met my husba- my late husband in high school He was an Army Brat and I had lived there my whole life and we just clicked." Nora sighs looking off in to the distance and smiled " For our first date he took me ice skating. Ice skating of all things. I fell flat on my face about 5 minuets in to trying to keep my balance on the ice in the rink. And you know what he did? He laughed! He did help me up but he laughed at me! He nearly didn't get a second date." She smiled and looked at Danse and he then saw something. Something that not many people had here, or anywhere for that matter anymore. He saw real true happiness. Something as small as this memory was enough to make her smile like she had just won a million caps. But something bothered him. She had said she was born in 2040. That was over 200 years ago. And the things she talked about, High school, Ice Skating, and Hospitals for that matter weren't around anymore. At least not in the same way they where pre-war.

"Mam, did I hear you correctly? You said you where born pre-war, That would make you over 200 years old." He said skittishly looking at her quite confused.

" Yes. I'm from before the bombs dropped." She said solemnly and dropped her head. She knew this day would come eventually. Where she would have to relive that day. The day she emerged from the Vault. It had been nearly 4 months since then. 4 months since she had taken the ring from her dead husbands corpse. 4 months since she had had a decent meal. 4 months since emerging from that damned Vault. And 4 months since she had given up on ever seeing her son ever again. In reality though it had been nearly 200 years since she had seen her husband alive and held her son in her arms. It had all seemed like a single moment that she had been frozen. Over all she hadnt aged at all while she was frozen. But the last few months had been the hardest of her life. She had had to kill for the first time and it took its toll. She counted every human she killed. She was at 258 at the moment. She kept track of the people because it kept her sane. No one carried an ID anymore, so she knew only a few peoples names. She did not like killing people. Animals she could deal with but not people.

"I am a Vault dweller, you do have that right. And I am not a Ghoul. I was... put in a stasis -frozen if you will, inside a cryogenic pod. Vault-Tec froze me, my late husband, and my... my son. We stayed frozen until a man and a woman in a clean suit came in to our vault. They took my son and shot my husband. Then they refroze me. Some how the systems that where keeping me frozen failed and I thawed out and woke up. And now here I am. I'm a drunk drugged up mess." It hurt to say those words. They had a sense of finality to them. Like she was speaking those actions in to existence. But they where true and had happened to her. She had experienced these things and she hadn't told anyone; until now.

Danse was shocked and a bit amazed and in awe at this little slip of a woman. And he was deeply and profoundly saddened by her losses. In her life she had found love and had a child. A life before the world went to hell. And a life she could never go back to. No wonder she chose to drink and get high all the time. He looked up at her and saw that shw was nearly on the verge of tears. And for all of his training with the Brotherhood and all of the combat he had seen and even all of the interactions with his fellow soldiers, he hadn't encountered this problem. A strange woman, from a strange time, crying and needing comfort for things he could not even imagine. And for all of his training he was no where near prepared for the thing that happened next. He felt his heart beat hard and as he looked at her in the low light he really saw her for the first time. Her face smooth and lovely and her thin body with the much too large clothes hanging off of the frame. She was the first woman he had ever actually experienced real attraction to. His face flushed as he reached for her.

Nora was shocked at this display of kindness from the Paladin. He hadn't shown any affection to any of the other members of his squad not even Scribe Haylen, who in Nora's opinion was much prettier than she was. Small and lithe and obviously very determined. Nora's once beautiful and well taken care of hair was matted and a complete mess now, her normally manicured nails dirty and broken and her usually cheerful spirit had been crushed the same way.

"Paladin have you seen my flask?" The flask that had disappeared the day she met the Paladin. The one she realized she dropped in to the rubble in the street when she had passed out outside the police station. And unknown to her the one that was hiding just under the corpse of a ghoul on the other end of Boston now.

"I think I saw a ghoul make off with it actually. After you fainted I was in a hurry to get you medical attention. I am very sorry it was lost." Danse now felt terrible. He had lost one of her possessions. A flash of sorrow went across his face.

"Oh its fine. I had found it in the rubble in Sanctuary. It was no big deal." She lied thinking back to Her and Nate's first anniversary. She had given him that flask and he had given her a beautiful rose shaped broach that matched her favorite dress. It was easy to lie to everyone now. She used to hate it with a passion. Whenever she would tell even a little white lie she would feel horrible. Now she could do it with a smile. She had to learn how to lie to get anything here in the Wastelands of Boston. And of all of the horrible things it was the least horrible.

"I will find it for you Nora." He said standing , grabbing her hands and clasping them in his gently. " I promise."

Nora looks up at him from her place on the bed. He smiles and looks down on her sincerely, then his eyes go wide as he realizes that he had jumped up and grabbed her hands, an intimate gesture in his mind. Elijah Danse had never been good with intimacy. He grew up in an orphanage in the Capitol Wastelands and never really saw people expressing affection towards each other.

"Danse... thank you." Afraid he could see right through her lies. Like he could sense the real meaning behind the flask.

"No problem Nora. In exchange will you consider an offer? I think the Brotherhood could really use a woman like you. We are always accepting new recruits. And I think you fit what we are looking for."


End file.
